Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades.
John Harvey MacDonald Jr. combat wounded, Vietnam 1969

Don’t boast when you set out but only when you get there.
Russian (on journeys)

Every dog has its day.
John Heywood (c.1497-1580)

Good counsellors lack no clients.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Have confidence in yourself and you can lick anything.
unknown

It’s not enough to know how to ride
must also know how to fall. – Mexican (on success and failure)

Nothing succeeds like success.
unknown

Success has many parents but failure is an orphan.
American (on success and failure)

We learn little from victory, much from defeat.
Japanese (on success and failure)

Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom.
Euripides

They can because they think they can.
Virgil

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
Thomas Jefferson

Keep steadily before you the fact that all true success depends at last upon yourself.
Theodore T. Hunger

We are all motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is, the more he is inspired to glory.
Cicero

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
Frank Loyd Wright

The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience.
Elbert Hubbard

There is only one success–to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Christopher Morley

Success is the child of audacity.
Benjamin Disraeli

Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.
An Wang

Failures to heroic minds are the stepping stones to success.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton

The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows.
Aristotle Onassis

The greatest results in life are usually attained by simple means and the exercise of ordinary qualities. These may for the most part be summed in these two: common-sense and perseverance.
Owen Feltham

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will.
Vince Lombardi

Everyone has a fair turn to be as great as he pleases.
Jeremy Collier

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure–which is: Try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.
Booker T. Washington

Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time.
Josh Billings

Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration, desperation, perspiration and inspiration.
Evan Esar

Careful thinking and hard work will solve nearly all your problems. Try and see for yourself.
Ullery

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do, well.
Henry W. Longfellow

The man who makes a success of an important venture never wails for the crowd. He strikes out for himself. It takes nerve, it takes a great lot of grit; but the man that succeeds has both. Anyone can fail. The public admires the man who has enough confidence in himself to take a chance. These chances are the main things after all. The man who tries to succeed must expect to be criticized. Nothing important was ever done but the greater number consulted previously doubted the possibility. Success is the accomplishment of that which most people think can’t be done.
C. V. White

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.
W.C. Fields

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.
Robert Collier